Matthew Bourbon

My art arises from a curiosity about how paintings are meant to
“speak.” It seems to me that there are various placeholders in
image making—figuration, the description of spaces, the use of
language, pattern building, and all sorts of other things that we
deem more or less “abstract.” These placeholders are ways for
us to anchor or lose ourselves to the “subject” of a painting. Using
a range of pictorial grammars, my art asks the viewer to be active
in building an idiosyncratic connection to the painted object.
Essentially I am after a kind of painting that is filled with
contradictions. My paintings are never meant as illustrations
of fixed ideas, but instead materialize from my thoughts and
questions meeting the happenstance events encountered
during the painting process. While not always foregrounded, there
is also a healthy dose of the absurd or satirical in my artistic
leanings and ambitions; like some modern-day Don Quixote,
I seek what is perhaps unreasonable—to find a way for my
paintings to declare things anew.